Yesterday one of the staunchest opponents of gay marriage, David Blankenhorn, had a change of heart and announced his support for gay marriage in an editorial in the New York Times.
Blankenhorn was a big supporter of California's Proposition 8, and was one of only two witnesses called in the California Supreme Court trial over the anti-gay marriage proposition that had been adopted by voters (Proposition 8 was pushed hard by the Mormon Church). But his testimony in the trial has often been characterized as being personal opinion rather than expert scientific testimony, and many believed that he actively hurt the case by testifying that gay marriage would reduce the divorce rate. The ban was struck down by the court.
Blankenhorn's evolution on gay marriage is good news, and further evidence that acceptance of gays is continuing an inevitable trend. I welcome his recognition that gays should enjoy the same rights as everyone else, and that they can and have made significant contributions in science, society and even war.
Take the case of Alan Turing, who was born this day 100 years ago. Turing was a mathematician and, by many accounts, the father of the digital computer. During WWII Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking center. He was responsible for building the machine that was able to find the settings for the Nazi Enigma cipher machine, which played no small part in the Allied victory over Hitler. (By the way, today's Google doodle is a reference to the Turing Machine.)
After the war Turing went on to design one of the first stored program computers. In 1952 his home was broken into and matter-of-factly Turing mentioned to the police that he had a male lover. He was charged with "acts of gross indecency." Turing accepted chemical castration by taking female hormones. He died two years later of cyanide poisoning. At the time his death was ruled suicide, but some recent theories posit that his death was accidental (he was experimenting with cyanide in his home, as his research had expanded beyond computing into chemistry and biology). Rather than being despondent, Turing was characterized as defiant, cheerful, and humorous by acquaintances in the days before his death.
In Turing's day, a mere sixty years ago, laws across the world were used to persecute gays and lesbians. Now such discrimination is limited to countries like Iran, where they executed three men for homosexual activity last year and have sentenced four more men to hang last month. Does conservative America really want to align itself with Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs on the issue of gays and gay marriage? Doesn't the American ideal of liberty and justice for all have a better ring?
1 comment:
Yeah - the state not recognizing gay marriage is exactly like the state executing people for being gay.
Are you familiar with the New Mexico wedding photographer that didn't want to shoot a gay wedding - she's been sued by them for that. Now, what exactly is the point of suing someone for that? Do you really want them to photograph your event - or are you trying to bully them into changing their own moral stance?
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